In 1957, David joined the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Established 11 years before in 1946, Argonne National Laboratory was—and is still today—a large research and development center owned by the United States Department of Energy and managed by the local universities of Illinois. It was the first national laboratory in the U.S. In its first couple of decades, which included the years David worked there, Argonne largely focused on developing non-military applications of nuclear physics.
David worked as an accelerator physicist helping build the zero-gradient synchrotron (ZGS). The ZGS would later play an integral role in trailblazing research into particle physics. He was mainly tasked with building the magnetic devices that would be used with the ZGS. “This was what I trained to do,” he says. “I started working with big magnets when I was a graduate student. Gradually, with one thing and another, I became an expert.” It was, he says, his first “real” job, and a critical step on his path to inventing biomagnetism and MEG.
With a good job in a large, world-class facility, David rented an apartment in the Hyde Park neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. Hyde Park was “a grand place to live,” he says, especially for a single person like himself. It was a vibrant community with restaurants, bars and countless other spots for socializing. Jackson Park and the beach were only blocks away. There was music and culture everywhere: not least, music performed by local orchestras and chamber ensembles, and folk dancing. David picked up the violin again and during summers attended chamber music camps.
The urbane lifestyle also extended to David’s home, “a marvelous building called the Cloisters.” Built in 1928, the Cloisters offered neo-gothic architecture and well-appointed interiors with semi-private elevators and views of Lake Michigan and the downtown Chicago skyline. “It was a gorgeous building and very distinguished living, with large fireplaces and things like that,” David says. Celebrated author Saul Bellow, later a Nobel Laureate in Literature, lived above him in the Cloisters.
If there was one downside to living in Hyde Park, it was the commute. Every day between the years of 1957 and 1965, David and several colleagues carpooled from the South Side of Chicago to the Argonne facility, roughly an hour’s drive away. The ride was tedious at best, with the same stale jokes and the same tired observations about the landscape passing by. “Every day, when we hit the railway tracks,” David recalls, “someone would say, ‘Okay, guys, it’s clear sailing from here on out.” After a couple of years, the riders mostly stopped talking at all.
By then, the commute wasn’t the only thing that was beginning to feel monotonous. David was starting to realize that his job was no longer wholly satisfying to him, that his passion as a scientist might ultimately lie elsewhere. Working as an accelerator physicist specializing in strong magnetic fields gave him both job stability and financial security, but he found that his thoughts kept drifting to another topic, one on the opposite end of the magnetic spectrum.
“I have a fancy job doing high-energy physics and working with big magnets,” he says, looking back on the Argonne days. “And for some reason I’m thinking, year in and year out, wouldn’t it be fun to measure very weak magnetic fields.” That is, the kind of fields generated by the weak ion electrical currents in the human body.
David wouldn’t be the first to attempt to record biomagnetism. In 1963, even as he was beginning to develop his own ideas, a group of researchers at Syracuse University reported that they had successfully measured the magnetic field of the human heart. In their experiments, though, in order to minimize the magnetic disturbances associated with everyday urban life, they performed the experiments in the middle of an empty field, far away from the cars, trains and countless other sources of magnetic disturbance in the city.
David had another idea: instead of escaping background noise, simply minimize it by building a magnetically shielded room. And he knew how it could be done. Drawing on his years of experience and expertise in the area, he wrote a proposal asking Argonne for support in building a magnetically shielded room.
He was sure he could make it work. “I was a shielding guy. The only difference was, where before I shielded against nuclear radiation, here I was shielding against external magnetic fields.” Despite his confidence and enthusiasm, though, he couldn’t convince the higher-ups at Argonne to fund the idea. If he wanted to build a shielded room to help measure the weak magnetic fields generated by the human body, he would have to do it elsewhere.
‘You Must Be Some Kind of Genius’
Here is where the tedious carpool becomes an important part of biomagnetism and the MEG story. One of the other members of the carpool was Lester Winsberg, a colleague at Argonne. In 1964, Winsberg, although a chemist, was appointed head of the physics department at the new University of Illinois campus in Chicago and tasked with hiring faculty for the department. He knew David was considering a career change, hoping to pursue his idea of measuring weak magnetic fields, so he offered him a job as an associate professor with the promise of tenure. Just as important: He would provide him with funding to build his “funny shielded room.”
David relates the story of how this came to pass in a typically self-deprecating fashion. “Lester Winsberg was my buddy in the carpool,” he recalls. “One day he said, ‘I’ve got a really tough problem in physics.’ It so happened that I had been working on the same problem. I popped up and said, ‘I know the answer to that.’ And he said, ‘boy, you must be some kind of genius,’ not realizing I had already spent weeks getting to the answer.”
Winsberg remembered this when it came time to populate the “swanky” new department at the University of Illinois. He wanted to hire people he knew, and he wanted people he knew to be sharp. “Lester thought I was brilliant,” David says with a laugh, “so he made me an offer.”
David was thrilled that he would finally be able to build a magnetically shielded room and thus measure the very weak signals emanating from the human body, but the opportunity to pursue his interests in biomagnetism wasn’t the only reason he found Winsberg’s offer appealing.
“I was not meant to be a high-energy physicist,” he says today. “I didn’t understand the quantum physics of those atom smashers. I was not good at it. I was frustrated because I was always going to be a second-rate high-energy physicist doing other people’s dirty work for them, building machines so other people could test their ideas.” Working at Argonne was a good experience for David; it added to his expertise with magnetic shielding and gave him the confidence to apply that expertise in novel ways. But ultimately, he knew, the facility was not where he belonged.
It would be a risky move, leaving a fancy job at a big national laboratory for a relatively uncertain future at a state university, but David knew he couldn’t pass up the opportunity. In any event, now a single man, and with no family to support, he could afford to take a pay cut while working the long and often erratic hours of an academic. So he said goodbye to his decade-plus career as an accelerator physicist.
